Anxiety I has it. Health care professionals will tell you that your sleep should be happy and restful and complete and if it isn’t they will pump you full of drugs until you don’t remember the question.
It first happened when I was very young, maybe 3. then again in my early teens. I woke up in an extreme state of “something” unpleasant. Like the world was coming to an end and extreme anxiety. As a teen I realized it was not normal and just went back to sleep. Then it started happening in adulthood and I realized what triggered it. It was the result of suffocating because of a stuffed up nose. It was triggering some kind of panic attack. I soon recognized it in my sleep because I would have claustrophobic dreams. They get progressively worse as I struggle to breathe. It use to get so bad I had to get dressed and leave the house. Now I can wake myself up before it gets out of control. I recognize the dreams for what they are and just wake up. It may take a few minutes but I need to distract myself with TV or something while the feelings subside.
Mine happens just after I wake up. For some reason, I find myself combining “shower time” with “let’s re-examine memories of the worst things that have ever happened to me”. Now that I have recognized it, I head it off by just focusing on the steps of what I have to do to get ready.
Not in the middle of the night, but most mornings.
Yeah, I don’t sleep at night, so it’s mornings for me too. But not most of them, just once in a while.
And usually it’s if I’ve only slept for a few minutes before waking up, not if I’ve been asleep long enough to hit REM and start dreaming.
Whoever blamed sleeping pills, nope lol. If anything they help prevent it by stopping me from having the wake up part in the first place.
They never do that for me. :mad: What does a person have to do to get pumped full of drugs around here?
I find that if I am in a claustrophobic state that a shower makes it worse. At that point just drinking water with a stuffed up nose makes it worse. I keep nose spray in my night stand.
Interesting. I keep Olba’s Inhalers next to the bed, in my purse, on the coffee table, everywhere. You can use it as often as you want. It’s a head-clearing, refreshing thing.
Why should I feel any different waking up than any other time?
Well for starters you’re coming out of a dream state. That’s like falling out of a different movie every time. Could be a comedy or a tragedy.
I wake up several times a week in the wee small hours feeling that heavy weight upon me. It hurts. Sometimes I’ll be crying when I wake, sometimes the tears will come as I lie there and think of the life I have wasted.
It’ll be when I dream of the woman who left me when we were 23 and left an unfillable hole in my heart. Twenty years later, I believe she’s happily married with kids. The dreams are always of me meeting her, re-kindling what we had, then, just when I’m sure that I am not dreaming and it’s all for real…she’ll go and I’ll be left in despair. Again.
I hurt because of the loneliness, the wasted years thinking it was just a blip, the fact that even if we did get back together, my youth is behind me. I just want to fade away and die, no real point to carry on, I’ll never be a success like the bloke she married, doubt I’ll find anyone who will understand me like she did, will never be a Dad… I’ll tidy up my affairs and jump off this mortal coil.
Except that in the light of day, everything seems better. Even now, recalling my feelings from the dead of the night, it doesn’t hurt like it does lying there, dying inside.
I have no idea what triggers it. Same outcome in the dream, different scenario, same pain.
That blanket of bricks hits me at random times. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night feeling completely hopeless and lost, sometimes it ambushes me at work. I can be plugging along just being me and doing what I do and then * Whammo * my breath catches, my eyes start stinging, and all is hopelessness and ruin–and entirely my fault. Were I a medieval doctor I’d say my brain is prone to developing melancholic pustules that simply burst, flooding my entire nervous system with sadness–because it’s even buckled my knees mid-stride. Instead I just go with “stress.”
I have also experienced that sudden “rug pulled out from under you” feeling.
On the thread “Why would a 9 yo suddenly be anxious about school?”, there was this post:
which I believe is related to this “impending doom” feeling. When I went through a period a few years ago of experiencing panic attacks really often, I read someplace that they can often be triggered by a physical thing, almost anything really… a twinge, a pain, a cramp, and stress would certainly fall into this category. For those of us with the blessing/curse of an extra-sensitive constitution, our brains go into alert mode and immediately try to find (or make up) an explanation, determine if there is danger, assess the danger, make plans for dealing with the danger, imagine what will happen if we cannot deal with the danger, etc., etc., and it goes on from there.
When that happens, I can’t talk myself out of the possibility of real, possibly life-threatening danger. I’ve had several experiences in my life where something happened and others tried to tell me, “Oh you’re worrying for nothing, it will be okay, it’s probably nothing,” and it most definitely was NOT nothing. In at least one case, because I was on high alert (higher than a blessedly “normal” person), I believe I saved my then-bf’s life… because I expected and anticipated the worst.
The trouble is, shit DOES happen. It could be a heart attack, or a murderous intruder, or a noise in the car that means something could cease to function while you’re going 60 mph. Most of the time it isn’t/doesn’t. But the one time it does, you’re dead.
Anyway… lately, when this happens, I take 1/4 mg of xanax and that helps.
It helps to know that others feel this and that artists and poets of the past have gone through it.
P.S. Has anyone ever seen a giant (like hundreds of acres) field of 6-foot+ sunflowers in full bloom? The first time I saw those humongous, fringed, blank faces all looking in the same direction, my first thought was, “Holy crap! No wonder van Gogh flipped out!”
Every night, but I have severe anxiety (I see a psychologist regularly).
Between 2 and 4 is the time I fear death/getting old the most, also.
I never feel like dawn won’t come. I worry that it will come too soon. I’d rather stay in bed.
No, but I’d like to; sounds cool. I think I’d be impelled to play Dorothy in the poppy field. “I… I’m so tired! I can’t run anymore!”
Then the sunflowers would just EAT YOU!! :eek: (What do you think the stuff is inside sunflower seeds, eh?)
Why never a horror movie about sunflowers. Stephen King?? Are you reading??
ThelmaLou,
I know this feeling. I have a normal life, am emotionally healthy and normal. BUT. If I wake up in the middle of the night (from having to use the bathroom), sometimes I feel very existential and afraid of death, or just a generalized strong fear. It is a feeling that swarms me, not one that seems to be tied to my thoughts. It is not a feeling I have any other time I am awake except after being awoken in the middle of the night. If I stay up late, I do not get this feeling.
When I take naps, sometimes I will wake up after the nap with a feeling of unwellness/feeling out of sorts that isn’t anywhere near as strong as the feeling I get in the middle of the night, but might be related.
The most I can make out of this is that while conscious, our mind is functioning at a high level (super ego and ego, to use psychoanalytic terms) and is inhibiting our base fears and desires. When we are asleep, that is when our unconscious (id) fears and desires can finally express themselves. Who knows though, because strangely, I don’t have dreams about being afraid of death.
Another possibility is that the brain chemistry is altered during sleep, and an abrupt interruption of the sleep cycle (through having to pee) causes brain chemistry that mimics fear (activation of the amygdala? dip in serotonin?).
What I do is try to avoid waking up in the middle of the night. I don’t drink water before bed so I won’t wake up. I don’t take many naps because they make me feel bad emotionally afterwards. As a side note, when I have sugar on an empty stomach, I feel sad afterwards.
There was a time when I was frequently consciously afraid of death during the day (15 years ago), and that fear was tied with my thoughts. That period lasted about a year. I think the trick to not fearing death is to be occupied with whatever it is in life that you are passionate about. Also, a comforting thought to me is that we were once nothing, and some force gave us life. Death is entrusting ourselves to that force once more.
Best wishes.
This.
Sometimes I wake up on the verge of tears for no apparent reason.
Sometimes I wake up angry, again for no apparent reason.
They both gradually dissipate as I go through my morning routine and get ready for work. Sometimes they linger once I’m at work, but are gone by lunchtime.
Then there are mornings where I wake up perfectly OK, like now.
Brain chemistry is a weird, wonderful, and mystifying thing.
You may have had a sad dream of which you were unaware right before you woke up. You could still be experiencing some residual emotion from the dream. I’ve awoken before with tears in my eyes over some dream I can’t quite remember.
I’ll occasionally wake up in a panic, usually not long (less than an hour) after I’ve first fallen asleep for the night. It’s not my typical panic attack that is hard to get myself out of – usually with this kind I can shake it off and reposition myself and get back to sleep. Sometimes I recite my whole name back to myself to convince myself I’m still me and the world is still OK. 
I’m thankful they don’t last long and everything is back to normal the next morning.